Liz Weil

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44 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jan 2025 last heard Jan 2025

Liz Weil’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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The Bulwark Daily · Derek Thompson and Elizabeth Weil: The Trend Toward Solitude · 9 Jan 2025 podcast

Maybe. You know, human beings are not rational. ProPublica's main climate reporter lives in a really fire-prone area and loves it. Like, it's just where his home is. So, like, people make these choices for lots of reasons, not just their climate risk. And, frankly, insurance is a big part of that. Like, a whole complicated other story of are we really paying what the risk is in insurance? Sure.

From talking to people, it seems to be the consensus that it's often very hard to make the decision that I should relocate right after your house is burned down, when you just want to get back home, when you just want to get back into your house again, and where whole counties are in distress and it's not really a great moment to have to make a whole new plan.

So one of the smartest people in FIRE had said to me, it's really his belief that the communities need to have planned ahead. that if you live in a fire prone county or city, It would be really prudent to have a plan of what you're going to do and what your citizens are going to do if there's a huge fire.

And are people going to rebuild their houses exactly where their footprints were in exactly the same fire-prone way? Or are you going to try to rebuild in a far more fire-safe kind of configuration of your city or your county? Or are people going to have plans to move? It's just so emotional. Like you're saying, you live in New Orleans. I'm sure you live there because you like it. Yeah.

Yeah. So it's sort of the same thing, the idea of managed retreat from sea level rise and people don't use the term as often, but it's the same situation of like, are people going to like retreat from these incredibly fire prone areas? Like my, my parents and my aunt all had houses in the same little cul-de-sac in Napa. And yeah, Where in 2017, like my aunt's house burned to the ground.

My parents' house a few doors away did not, but just by luck. The whole community rebuilt right there because that's what the insurance money was. Whatever. There's so much inertia in that moment. And it's also completely insane to rebuild in some of these places.

You know, I haven't paid super close attention to what's going on now, but the big story of water in California is agriculture, not salmon. It's really not. So to me, it's like if you're not talking about agriculture when you're talking about water in California, you're having a completely disingenuous conversation.

So I don't know exactly what's going on with these wells that had sort of dried up uphill and downhill. I think it was in Altadena. I think that's a much more local issue. But on a big scale of like, is this, you know, people getting precious about salmon? That's a political conversation, not a practical one.

You know, there are things like... a certain subset of experts really talk about that are practical that you can do for your own home. Like have what people call a defensible space around your home. Like don't have a lot of like, vegetation right up against your building, you know, like clear your yard, have a roof that is far more fire safe than the roof that's probably on your house right now.

So there's like a lot of talk about, you know, ways that you can just get your house not to light your neighbor's house on fire. Like a lot of the fire people also talk about that, that it's a little bit of a herd immunity problem that once a community starts burning, you know, All the houses are far more vulnerable.

So if you have a house that's just like a tinderbox, you're putting your neighbor at risk. So there's that sort of very local level of protection. And then I think that there are just the big issues like this is a climate change problem or it's exasperated by climate change. It is going to get worse. We have some control over how much worse it's going to get, right?

And that conversation and even just the idea of climate change so often gets left out of reporting when you're in a moment. There's like a huge house, like some celebrity's house is on fire. And that's like far more compelling than emissions. But if we're going to have a saner future, that needs to be part of the conversation.

We can't put our heads in the sand. And it's an issue that exists on like the biggest scale and the smallest scale. Like you're saying, like we're in a moment where politically it's really difficult to do anything about what was already a monstrously difficult problem. But you can still decide where you live. You can still decide what kind of roof you have.

You can still, you know, you can still make these very, these very civic choices, which we do have a lot of control over.

Well, yes. So this is true. I was writing a profile of Sam Altman and I was just sort of doing regular reporter due diligence of trying to learn about his family. And I was reading an obituary for his father. And it mentions a sister, Annie Altman, like the Altman brothers. He has two brothers, Jack and Max. are mentioned in the press all the time. And they're like, they had a venture fund.

And, you know, there are these pictures of them and narratives about them. And Annie was mentioned nowhere in any of this. Like the New Yorker ran a huge profile years ago. No mention of Annie. So I was like really struck of like, who is Annie? Why have I never heard about Annie? So I started poking around. And yes, I went to go visit her in Hawaii a year and a half ago.

And like a lot of families, there's a really complicated dynamic in their family. And Annie, like, I don't know exactly what happened in private between the Altman siblings or what happened in private in their childhood, but she is obviously incredibly hurt by whatever it is that happened. And she has obviously been, until very recently, written out of the story for some reason.

That's insane. So the part that is like was not difficult to report out at all are these kinds of facts that you're talking about, where Annie was living in her car while Sam was running OpenAI. Annie did not have money for food while Sam was running OpenAI. Annie started doing sex work because she needed money while Sam was running OpenAI.

Annie got sent a memorial diamond, I don't know if you know about these things, out of their father's ashes. Like if somebody you love dies, you can send their ashes somewhere and have it turned into a diamond, like an actual diamond. So Annie is living in Hawaii, totally broke, worrying about money for food, when Sam sent her...

I forgot what was an email or text, but I, you know, whatever the, I've read these things saying like, where should I send this Memorial diamond?

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